A Declaration of Independence for Home Inspectors
Have you noticed how the real estate world is changing? And not to support home inspections?
The real estate professional wants to drive that sale and do it quickly, so they try to minimize your value. If you could just do this one thing…
If you are feeling like you are being squeezed, you are. More and more real estate agents are asking us to bypass our skills so they can make a quick sale.
It’s time to stand up for the home inspection industry.
Signs Your Service is Being Devalued
It doesn’t happen all at once. It builds. You start getting calls from a new real estate professional and they test the waters by asking you to do them a favor to start a business relationship. Or, a long-time real estate professional starts asking you for favors based on your long working relationship. Bottom line is they start asking for something that is not a home inspection.
- Visual inspection
- Quick walk-through inspection
- Verbal inspection
- Inspection with no written report
And it’s phrased as if you’d be doing them a big favor.
Have you noticed requests like these increasing? If you have, support our community by saying no.
NO MORE!
You are not serving your client’s best interests. Instead, you are operating to protocols that have infected the real estate market, the housing industry, and the homes of Americans themselves.
Why You Get Those Requests
The real estate industry is tearing apart from the inside. For years, our relationship with realtors was based on personal relationships. Positive personal relationships where the agent recognized the value home inspectors bring to their transactions. We bring truth and trust.
But over the past few years online services have led a migration away from normal standards of the realtor organization to platforms that are not regulated by the industry.
Consumers, your clients, are going to these sites to find properties. They develop conversations on these sites. Where conversations go, so goes business.
But these sites are business savvy and nimble, they are just as evasive of the truth as the real estate industry. We all understand its sales, and we also all understand that comes in many different varieties.
These new channels steer the conversation towards expediency, trying to make the sales process proceed as quickly as possible.
And because of this shift, indirectly you the inspector by responding to rushed and incomplete reporting assume liability and responsibility if something goes wrong in the future. And it will, guaranteed. How can it not? There is always something wrong.
What You Can Do to Support The Home Inspection Industry
Choose to refuse. You are becoming the standard bearer of integrity within the housing industry, specifically the real estate market.
If you work with a realtor 100% committed to their clients, go out of your way to serve and support them. That is how we help preserve the integrity of the home inspection industry within the Realtor community.
Provide professional, objective home inspections, one family at a time. You are on the front line, this is the home front. You help build and strengthen the communities of our nation. You help people make wise decisions with the information you provide.
And sometimes you save a family from not making a mistake in buying a home that requires expensive repairs or retrofitting. Or you help a couple know their first home will be safe and sound. Help empty-nesters find a secure and comfortable place to retire. Without your knowledge and expertise, all of these homebuyers could end up in a place that is not safe or structurally unsound.
We do our job, and do it well, because it matters to people in their homes.
Truth is Our Business
Be the rise of the individual bearer of truth. That’s what home inspectors do. That’s why people trust us.
Without our knowledge and truth-bearing, some home buyers are going to get burned, some of them badly. It is avoidable if you simply say no.
So, all those transactions where realtors say “we need to waive the inspection contingencies if we want to get our offer accepted” … You won’t get that business. And, you should want to be no part of that business. If you do, you undermine the entire home inspection business.
Stay the course, and bring truth to consumers. Without our knowledge, experience, and expertise they go blind into a real estate transaction.
Be the truth people trust.
